Nothing she has written drills down into her past, and her family’s, as powerfully as Memorial Drive. It is a controlled burn of chaos and intellection; it is a memoir that will really lay you out.

... we see the deep saturation of luminous images and resonant meaning that Trethewey's work is known for. And while it can be tempting to take for granted this stunning language that characterizes Trethewey's poetic voice, it is important to note here the high level of craft that sustains this quality of resonant, imagistic intensity through the several hundred pages of linear prose narration that is here. In Memorial Drive, the musicality of language combines with imagistic intensity to create a world of heightened subjectivity in which the small moon that is the young Trethewey orbits the constant planet that is her mother and her entire world; thus her mother's death and its aftermath — the emptiness of her absence — rockets loud across the constellation of Trethewey's life.

Memorial Drive is, among so many other wondrous things, an exploration of a Black mother and daughter trying to get free in a land that conflates survival with freedom and womanhood with girlhood.

... details are carefully chosen: sparse but vivid. Trethewey’s souvenirs from the past, inflected with the knowledge of the poet she’d become, have the intentionality of memorials, not just memories.

...transcendent.

... a luminous and searing work of prose.

... riveting.

... an exquisitely written, elegiac memoir.

For me, this was the best written book of the year. Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Tretheway waited until she was at the top of her game as a writer to take on conveying the murder of her mother when she was nineteen. Most writers would have started off addressing that kind of experience at the beginning of their writing life. But Tretheway’s book is not only a terrible and riveting 'story,' it is a masterclass in writing. The book is slim but communicates extraordinarily well. The way she knows when to break a scene and move on, or the decisions about collaging in police documents, are all made with the highest level of understanding about how words work and how form must come from the content, from the emotions at the core of the piece. Painful, and deeply affective..

Trethewey delves into memory like never before in this book and allows us to witness her resurfacing.

To survive trauma one must be able to tell a story about it,' writes Natasha Trethewey in her memoir Memorial Drive . The Pulitzer Prize-winning poet uses metaphor to investigate the forensics of unfathomable loss: her mother's death at the hands of her stepfather.

Trethewey’s memoir is a lyric confrontation with grief—the way it shapes and reshapes memory over time, permeating even those decades preceding loss. The author’s childhood recollections, laced with lessons on myth and metaphor, draw a detailed backdrop to her early years as a mixed-raced child in the segregated South—the South her father, a white Canadian citizen, knew little about, and her mother, a black woman from Mississippi, knew well.

... the work of a poet. A great poet.

... powerful.

Like her earlier collections, Memorial Drive is written with a poet’s keen ear for language and Trethewey’s knack for historical detail and retrospection. Using descriptions of photographs, dreamscapes, memories of historical events (such as Gerald Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon in 1974) and even transcripts of the final phone calls between Turnbough and Grimmette, Trethewey builds a narrative that asks: How does one get intimately close to violence and still survive? Memorial Drive proves that the answer is neither simple nor singular, and memory is only one of the avenues we travel in our quest to remember those we’ve lost..

Three decades ago that masterly American writer Tobias Wolff published This Boy’s Life, his classic memoir of a troubled childhood and a bullying, unpredictably violent stepfather...It’s no exaggeration to say that Natasha Trethewey’s book belongs in the same exalted company.

Memorial Drive is the work of a brilliant adult, reframing the insights of an uncommonly keen child, and there are times when the difficulties of recalling the child as an adult are evident.

The book is cleverly crafted, insightful and moving.

Exploring personal trauma, memory, and closure, Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize–winner Trethewey returns to the site of her mother’s murder.

It is humbling to read Grimmette’s calm, clear voice, so accomplished that even the women in the shelter where she seeks refuge when fleeing from Joel ask her for career advice. How could anyone fail to save a person of such substance?.

The power of this memoir resides in how she crafts searing declarative statements that are devastatingly clear. The moment when young Natasha becomes editor of the school literary magazine and excitedly talks about becoming a writer are discouraged by her stepfather in a moment that is all too common in an abusive household. He tells her she won’t become a writer, but Gwendolyn halts the conversation by stating and repeating 'Natasha will be whatever she wants.' By this time, Natasha is aware of the situation between Gwendolyn and her stepfather, Joel. She knows that this will mean blows behind closed doors and more threats.

Natasha Trethewey, two-term United States Poet Laureate, forges a serious, poignant work of remembrance.

As a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and former U.S. poet laureate, Trethewey...has conducted profound excavations into African American history and her own life. In her memoir, a work of exquisitely distilled anguish and elegiac drama.

...[a] beautifully composed, achingly sad memoir.

Former U.S. Poet Laureate Trethewey, winner of a Pulitzer Prize, Guggenheim Fellowship, and many other awards, begins her graceful, moving memoir with her mother’s murder in 1985.